Part travelogue, part essay, part epistolary reverie, this endlessly seductive magnum opus from the late French polymath Chris Marker eludes categorization. An unseen, unnamed narrator comments on or reads from letters written by a vagabond cameraman named Sandor Krasna over a beguilingly digressive stream of images captured in Iceland, Japan, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Île-de-France, and San Francisco. Associative and lyrical, playful and meditative, Sans Soleil circles themes of memory and history, time and its ceaselessness. There are continual leaps in editing, sudden freeze-frames, and the fleeting, rebellious thrill that arises when a subject looks directly at the camera. A quintessential example of the fusion of documentary and invention, it’s a film for those who long to wander with insatiable curiosity, who are fascinated by the sacred-exotic, who want to remember everything, even though they know perfectly well that memory’s really just the lining of forgetting. – José Teodoro
In French, Japanese, English, Cantonese, Japanese sign language, with English subtitles.
Introduced by author, critic, and curator José Teodoro and followed by an informal conversation.
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